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ZERMATT

Name: ZERMATT
Author: Frank Schaeffer
ISBN: 0-7867-1259-7

by Frank Schaeffer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2003

An amiably diverting account of domestic chaos, but nothing more.

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The last of a trilogy (Portofino, 1992; Saving Grandma, 1997), this set in 1966, about the mixed-up childhood of Calvin Becker, whose parents were missionaries working to save the Swiss.

At 14, Calvin Becker has more to get over than most preachers’ children: His father Ralph isn’t just a preacher, but a missionary—and in one of the most inhospitable corners of the entire globe: Switzerland. Reformed Presbyterians of the strictest hue, the Beckers consider Lutherans to be only slightly better than Catholics, and they’ve spent more than a decade in the Alpine wastes trying to save them both. It’s not the easiest place to save souls, and Ralph would frankly have preferred to preach to the Hottentots or Zulus, who have been known to convert en masse, but his wife Elsa is the daughter of the mission board director, and this may have been the reason behind their assignment to the tepid but temperate northern climes. As both the baby of the family and the only boy, Calvin is very much under the domination of his mother and two sisters, but he’s starting to chomp at the bit somewhat in an early-adolescent kind of way. Last summer on vacation, he let an English girl kiss him once, and this year he’s taking lessons from Eva, the hotel maid, who brings him breakfast in bed and performs un petit service at the same time. It’s a crisis in the making, of course, but just as Calvin’s corruption is about to be discovered, he’s saved by his father—who at precisely the right moment suffers a nervous breakdown and renounces his faith.This takes the pressure off Calvin, but it creates a dilemma for him as well: How can you rebel against a rebel? Calvin has to find a way of converting his father so that life can get back to normal. Sort of.

An amiably diverting account of domestic chaos, but nothing more.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-7867-1259-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God
by Frank Schaeffer

- BOOK REVIEW
SEX, MOM, AND GOD
by Frank Schaeffer

- BOOK REVIEW
PATIENCE WITH GOD
by Frank Schaeffer

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.